A Strong Push From Backstage

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A 'More Effective Role'

When Bush tapped Cheney to be his running mate seven years ago, he chose a man who had put a great deal of thought into how a vice president can transform himself from a funeral-trotting figurehead into a center of real power.

As President Gerald R. Ford's chief of staff in the 1970s, Cheney saw firsthand how White House policies got shaped -- and how a vice president such as Nelson Rockefeller could become so marginalized as to be dumped from the ticket. Former Army secretary John O. Marsh Jr. said Cheney knew that he needed to control the process by which the president makes choices to ride "the rushing river of power" that winds through the West Wing to the Oval Office.

"Dick's major concern, one of them was, and I agree, that there needs to be a greater and more effective role for the vice president," Marsh, a longtime Cheney friend, said in an interview. "He holds the view, as do I, that the vice president should be the chief of staff in effect, that everything should run through his office."

In Bush, Cheney found the perfect partner. The president's willingness to delegate left plenty of room for his more detail-oriented vice president.

"My impression is that the president thinks that the Reagan style of leadership is best -- guiding the ship of state from high up on the mast," said former White House lawyer Bradford A. Berenson. "It seems to me that the vice president is more willing to get down in the wheelhouse below the decks."

When the space shuttle Columbia disintegrated over Texas on Feb. 1, 2003, for example, Bush was consumed with concern for the families of the seven dead astronauts. That left Cheney to make the first critical decisions about the future of manned spaceflight.

Even as the vice president and others were grappling with the invasion of Iraq, Cheney crafted a solution to the most pressing problem facing the space program, said former NASA administrator Sean O'Keefe, a Cheney protege.

With its shuttle fleet grounded, the space agency had no way to resupply the crew aboard the international space station, including two Americans. Russia was demanding $100 million to take up the slack. But Congress had barred space-related payments to Moscow unless the administration could certify that the Russians were not transferring banned technology to Iran for nuclear, biological or chemical weapons. Getting the law changed would take time, and could "open up a can of worms" with no guarantee that the result would be to the administration's liking, O'Keefe said.

The vice president's solution, he said, was to get around the law by cutting the deal as a barter. The Russians wouldn't charge the United States for the costs of flying to the space station, and in return, the Americans wouldn't charge the Russians for their share of some operating and equipment costs.

The vice president then took the lead in persuading the State Department to go along with the plan, which never came to public attention. "He helped frame how to do this without a major diplomatic dust-up," O'Keefe said.